For website owners it is often desirable to have an idea of the persons visiting the website, e.g. in order to adjust the content presented on the website to match the visitors, thereby being able to keep the attention of the visitor, and possibly make it desirable for the visitor to return to the website at a later point in time.
In the world of marketing, theoretical personal profiles, often referred to as ‘personas’ are sometimes used for defining personal profiles of target visitors, and for designing and authoring the website in a manner which is presumably appealing to the target visitors. However, these theoretical profiles are merely ‘good guesses’ regarding the personal profiles and preferences of the visitors who are actually visiting the website, and the owner of the website is not in a position to evaluate the relation between the contents presented on the website and the preferences of the visitors actually visiting the website.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,975 B1 discloses a method for dynamically placing objects in slots on a web page in response to current client request for the web page. The users are classified into user groups based on one or more user-characteristics, and self-learning data is accumulated based on user click behaviour for each user group. The current client request is matched with a corresponding user group, and real-time selection of the slots for the objects on the web page is scheduled based on the self-learning data of the corresponding user group.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,389,917 B2 discloses a computerized method that provides a web page having control structures for gathering behavioural biometrics. The method can compare received behavioural biometric data with at least one set of previously established values. The user can be profiled based upon comparison results. This profiling can affect the manner in which web pages are provided to the user as well as the content contained therein.